


In Memoriam

by kiashyel



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-14
Updated: 2013-09-14
Packaged: 2017-12-26 13:36:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/966548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiashyel/pseuds/kiashyel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Be near me when my light is low, When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick and tingle; and the heart is sick, and all the wheels of Being slow... Be near me when I fade away, to point the term of human strife, and on the low dark verge of life the twilight of eternal day.”</p>
<p>-- from "In Memoriam" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Memoriam

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for the season four finale and I've made some assumptions about things that might happen in the final episodes.

“Daisies, pansies, columbines…” Pete muttered as he plucked the freshly cut flowers from the available selection. He couldn’t find any of the others; these would have to do. Carefully holding the stems in his thick fingers, Pete walked to the register and deposited the loose flowers onto the counter where the florist set to work wrapping them in brown recycled paper.

“These are lovely,” the middle-aged woman commented, neatly arranging the fresh white petals of the daisies among the hues of lush purple. “What’s the occasion?”

Pete’s eyes were downcast as he extracted his wallet and thumbed through the bills. “It’s, uh, it’s for an anniversary,” he quietly answered.

“For your wife?” the florist’s lips turned upward in a smile.

Pete shook his head. “I’m not married.”

 

* * *

 

**ONE YEAR EARLIER**

The breeze was strong but it brushed against Myka’s face with a delicate grace. She pulled her jacket tight and crossed her arms over her chest to ward off the chill, but closed her eyes and relished the moment. Water lapped tranquilly at the dock beneath her. Dry leaves, crackling like the pages of ancient books, danced in the wind and rustled on the bank behind her. 

Myka sighed and opened her eyes. The breeze had shattered the reflection of the sunset and turned the water into a lake of molten gold and copper. A second later, pounding footsteps and snapping twigs disturbed her serenity. Then came the scolding.

“Myka Ophelia Bering,” Pete admonished as he jogged easily along the water’s edge and approached her on the dock. “I turn my back for two minutes to call Artie and you disappear! Jeez, you sure can move fast for a…”

When he clamped his lips shut, Myka’s brow rose. “For a dying woman?” she finished. “You _can_ say it, Pete. There’s no reason to tiptoe around it.”

He didn’t have to say it. Myka’s impending death was evident. It was noticeable in the way her clothes hung loosely on her body, apparent in the dark circles around her eyes, unmistakable in the hollow gauntness of her face, and obvious in how rapidly she was losing strength.

They stared at each other for a long moment before Pete finally said, “Are you about done here? The others will be at your parents’ soon.”

Myka gave a little shake of her head. Wordlessly, Pete put an arm around her waist and gently led her off the dock. During the slow trek back to the SUV, Myka leaned on her partner for support and shared with him her happy memories of the woodland area. She told him about the ghost stories and marshmallow roasts from her Girl Scout days, of the fishing trips with her father, of close encounters with wild animals, and romantic campouts with former loves. She admitted to wishing she had found a similar place to make such memories in South Dakota.

As Pete helped her into the passenger seat of the SUV, he curiously asked, “What else do you wish you had done?”

“You really want to get into this?”

“Yeah,” he nodded. “I want to know what you won’t get crossed off your bucket list.” After closing her door and crossing in front of the vehicle to slide behind the wheel, Pete saw Myka looking at him hesitantly. “Really, Mykes, I wanna know,” he urged.

“OK,” she took a deep breath. As Pete started the SUV and began the relatively short drive back to her hometown, she told him, “Well there’s the obvious big ones – get married, have a family, climb Everest, write a bestselling novel. What else? Search for the Amber Room, see one of Shakespeare’s plays at the Globe, go travelling in a hot air balloon, crack the Voynich Manuscript…”

Pete drove in silence while Myka worked through the list of things she would never get to do. Most were typical braniac-Myka things, having  to do with smarty-pants intellectual stuff in books he’d never read or something historical and boring, but he wanted her to keep talking, wanted to soak in every word she spoke, every vocal inflection. He was terrified of the time when he would never hear Myka speak again.

When they arrived at Bering & Sons bookstore, Pete gave Myka a hand getting out the car. The feather light weight of her rested against him as he reached for the door and as he held it open for her, he heard a faint whisper fall from her lips.

“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember.”

“What was that?” Pete’s brow knitted in confusion. She didn’t respond immediately and he followed her gaze to a window box on the storefront, packed with moist, dark loam.

“Rosemary for remembrance,” she repeated. “It’s from Ophelia’s garland speech in _Hamlet_. I was just thinking about how I helped build this flowerbox for my mom and about the annuals we planted in it.” She continued to stare at the rectangle of dirt. “I won’t be here to see them bloom again.”

Clearing his throat, Pete gave her a small nudge. “Come on, Mykes; the others should be here by now.”

His prediction turned out to be correct. Artie, Steve, and Claudia were all inside the bookshop, talking with the Berings in quiet tones. All eyes turned to Pete and Myka as they entered and the Warehouse trio struggled to hide their surprise at how quickly Myka’s health had declined.

“Hey Myka,” Steve softly crooned a greeting and he and Claudia rushed over to flank her, each taking a hand to guide her to the easy chair in the rear of the store. Pete stepped aside to let them take over and he and Artie shared the same expression of sadness and concern. Claudia launched into an animated telling of the antics that occurred during the journey from the Warehouse to the bookshop and everyone was pleased to hear Myka’s warm, infectious laugh.

Mrs. Bering had made a large casserole and several side dishes, enough to be able to feed everyone and they all dined on TV trays, seated in a semi-circle around Myka. It had been what she wanted, to have all of her favorite people together in one of her favorite places, surrounded by her favorite things. She had said so to Pete when he’d arrived earlier that week and he’d made the arrangements to have Artie, Claudia, and Steve come to Colorado. Everyone ate heartily, complimenting Mrs. Bering on the delicious meal, except for Myka. She ate like a bird at the best of times, but now she didn’t even touch her food. It took everything Pete had not to force feed her. He still wasn’t ready to let her go.

Late that evening, after helpings of bundt cake and endless cups of tea, Pete turned down Artie’s offer of going with him, Steve, and Claudia back to a nearby motel and instead elected to stay with Myka. Artie gave a knowing nod of his head, laid a thick hand on Pete’s shoulder, and then departed without another word. Navigating the shelves and stacks of books in the dim light, Pete worked his way into the Berings’ home and climbed the stairs to Myka’s childhood bedroom. He found her propped up on pillows and tucked cozily beneath a thick comforter with a checkerboard of books ranged out beside her on the bed, her eyes fixed on the open tome she held on her lap.

Rapping his knuckles lightly on the doorframe to announce his presence, Pete stepped into the circle of yellow light thrown by the antique table lamp and asked, “Whatcha reading?”

Myka tilted the book and he saw the gilded script on the cover – _The Complete Works of William Shakespeare_. “I’m looking back through _Hamlet_ , at the scene I mentioned earlier,” she said.

He approached the bed and cleared a space for himself to sit. Myka passed him the book and he followed along as she began to recite, “’There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember: and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts. There’s fennel for you, and columbines: there’s rue for you; and here’s some for me. We may call it herb-grace o’ Sundays; O you must wear your rue with a difference. There’s a daisy; I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died; they say he made a good end…’”

Myka’s voice trailed off into nothing and Pete closed the weighty volume. She seemed so far away. It was like he was looking at an old photograph of the Myka he knew. Pete could recognize traces of her, but they were as worn and frayed as the vintage books spread out on the mattress between them.

“Pete?” Myka said after awhile, still looking past him.

“Yeah?”

“What do you think heaven is like?”

“Come on, Mykes; you’re the one who’s read a million books. Hasn’t one of them given you an answer?”

Her chin bobbed slowly. Summoning the Myka laying dormant within, she demurred, “I know what Dante said and what thousands of poets and philosophers have said since the beginning of time, but none of them have an answer. Is it just endless and empty or are there billions of souls just wandering around aimlessly? Do you have memories of what you left behind or do you forget everything? Are you still you in heaven or do you become a votary to the deity of your beliefs?” The queries fell rapidly from her tongue and then abruptly halted. Myka met Pete’s gaze.

“Will I spend eternity wishing for all of the things I should have done?”

Pete had no response.

"Is there more after all of this…” she touched thin fingertips to her wilting chest, rested them lightly on her protruding collarbone, “…or does it just… End?”

 "I don’t know, Myka,” he said. He edged closer to her, stretching his legs out parallel to her own and reclining against the headboard. Pete slid his arm around her shoulder and she rested against his side, immediately finding a comfortable spot where they fit together easily.

“What do you want it be like? What’s your idea of eternal paradise?”

“A library,” she replied, her tone a mixture of passion and reverence. “A great big, massive library with all of the books that have been or will be written. That’s how I want to spend eternity – reading my way through the whole of the human experience.” Myka looked up at him, her dark eyes alight as she waited for him to comment.

“Bo-ring!!” Pete crowed. “Man, that is just _lame_!”

Myka buried her face into his chest and he felt her trembling as laughter rattled its way out of her body. It was a dry and dusty sound but there was joy in it. A lump caught in Pete’s throat as he suddenly wondered how many more times he would hear Myka laugh before…before…

“OK smartass,” she prodded, “what do you want heaven to be like?”

Pete pressed his lips together as he considered the question. “A huge room with a big screen TV and a long table full of any food I would ever want. There’d be unlimited sports channels and gorgeous tight t-shirt wearing girls to wait on me and the place would always smell like fresh baked cookies.”

“You are such a pig,” Myka admonished him good-naturedly.

Earnestly, Pete added, “I think heaven is whatever you want it to be. I think maybe everyone has their own little spot that’s just how they want it.”

The room fell silent, saving for the rhythmic ticking of the mantel clock perched on the nightstand. Eventually, Myka asked him, “Do you think you can cross over into other people’s heavens?”

“I hope so,” he told her. “I mean, I’d like to see my dad again. And Leena.”

“And me?”

Pete swallowed hard. “Yeah, of course, you too.”

Quiet descended again. Pete could feel the shallow rise and fall of Myka’s chest as her lungs tried to expand. She was his partner, but they were bound by deeper ties than the word allowed. They had fought with and for one another, protected each other, saved the world together. They were more than partners, more than friends. What they shared was ineffable. Directly caused by the accursed artifacts of the Warehouse, Myka had briefly been pregnant because of a fleeting thought in Pete’s mind and they had, on one occasion, even switched bodies. And yet, he had never felt closer to her or more intimate, than he did at the current moment.

Leisurely, Pete’s lips curled into a smile. “Remember the last time you and I were in bed together?”

“Oh god,” Myka groaned. “When I was blonde and we bronzed Steve?”

Pete laughed. “Ah, the good ol’ days.”

He thought about the bronzing process again. After the fallout of everything that happened with Paracelsus, Myka had made Pete swear an oath to not use Warehouse artifacts to try and cure her. Even still, he had continued combing the catalogue, looking for anything that could potentially work. Finally, as a last resort, Pete had suggested bronzing her until a successful cure for the cancer could be found.

“And what if it takes another fifty or a hundred years to find that cure, Pete?” Myka had demanded. “What kind of life would I have then, waking up in the Warehouse decades from now without you or Artie or Claudia or Steve?”

“Claud’ll still be there,” he’d countered. “She’s the new Mrs. F.”

Myka had leveled him with a cold glare and told him that the last thing she wanted was to be out of her own time, to be forced to move on and  relearn the world as Helena had struggled to do. That had been the end of Pete’s quest.

But now, he couldn’t help himself. He said, “I still think bronzing could work for now.”

Myka stiffened against him. “You said you’d drop it, Pete.”

“I can’t, Mykes. I can’t just do nothing.” His insides quivered with uselessness, his muscles strained against the failures of his attempts to save her.

Myka outstretched her hand and picked up a leather bound book from her side of the mattress. “Here,” she passed it to him. “You can read to me.”

Pete sighed. Reading wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind. He opened the tome to the place she had marked and he read at the top of the pages _“Alfred, Lord Tennyson – The Princess: A Medley”_

“There,” Myka pointed to a place in the print.

“Can I read it in different voices?” Pete looked down to ask his question and his breath bristled her dark lackluster curls.

“No, you may not. This is Tennyson. He deserves more respect than to have his work sound like Yoda.”

“Fine,” Pete sighed. Then, he cleared his throat and began to read aloud.

“And I sank and slept, filled through and through with Love, a happy sleep. Deep in the night I woke: she, near me, held a volume of the Poets of her land: There to herself, all in low tones, she read. ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white; Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk; Nor winks the gold fin in the por…por…’”

“Porphyry,” Myka supplied.

“’…porphyry font: The fire-fly wakens: wake thou with me. Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost, and like a ghost she glimmers on to me. Now lies the Earth all Danae to the stars, and all thy heart lies open unto me. Now lies the silent meteor on, and leaves a shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me. Now folds the lily all her sweetness up, and slips into the bosom of the lake: So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip into my bosom, and be lost in me.’”

Pete read aloud until it was obvious that, much like the prince in Tennyson’s poem, Myka sank into sleep. Surprising himself, he continued reading the poem on his own, the tale of Princess Ida and the unnamed prince inspiring him to action.

 

* * *

 

What awakened Myka was the sound of ripping paper. She stared in horror at the sight of Pete snapping _The Princess_ closed and holding the torn endpage in his hand. Pete dropped the wine and gold covered tome onto the bed and as he began tearing an inch wide strip from the blank page, Myka felt sick and halfway to fainting but the feeling was quickly replaced with fury.

"Pete!” she shrieked his name with as much strength as she could gather. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? That is a Zaehnsdorf Limited bookbinding from the early nineteen hundreds.”

“Good. Then it’ll be more special,” he stated.

“What will?” Myka pressed but he didn’t answer. She watched him fold the paper and awaited the final outcome.

“This,” he presented a simple origami ring on the palm of his hand and then uttered five words she never expected to hear from his lips. “Will you marry me, Myka?”

Dreaming. She had to be dreaming.

Myka squeezed a piece of her forearm between her thumb and forefinger and a sharp pain throbbed beneath the fold of skin. She was conscious, she realized. Maybe her medication was making her hallucinate.

"I’m serious, Mykes,” Pete said. “Marry me.”

“Why?” she expelled the word on a quick, shrill breath.

The full weight of his emotions were in his eyes as he explained, “Because you won’t let me use the artifacts to save you and because I can’t help you solve the riddle of the Sphinx or decode the Voyager Manuscript or any of the nerdtastic things from your bucket list. What I can do, is marry you.”

“Pete, I’m not going to marry you just to achieve a dying wish,” Myka informed. She gently touched her fingertips to the inside of his wrist and lowered the offering he still held out toward her.

“Myka…” Pete edged closer as he whispered her name. “Since we started working together at the Warehouse, the idea of us has crossed my mind a few times. Firstly in a ‘wow, she’s hot, I’d tap it’ kind of way.”

Myka couldn’t hold back a chuckle.

“Then I thought about it more seriously, but decided it was a bad idea because we were partners and we worked together and we live at the B&B and when I inevitably did something to screw things up, it would be a disaster for all of us. People always say you end up marrying your best friend and…well…you’re my best friend, Mykes. Whenever I’ve thought about the future and the woman I’d eventually settle down with, a part of me always thought it would be you. I know we’ve never come close to having anything remotely romantic between us, but without trying I could always picture us as a couple of old geezers, still best friends and in love with each other fifty years later, sitting on a porch playing Scrabble or something. You’d be kicking my ass with words like ‘residuum’ while I kept spelling things like ‘cat.’”

Pete dropped his eyes. “But none of that will ever happen. We’ll never know if that could have worked.”

Unable to speak, Myka rubbed his wrist with her bony thumb in a comforting gesture. She could be honest – honesty was one of the few things she had left – and admit to herself that she had, on occasion envisioned a life not too dissimilar from the one Pete had described. In her version, she would be reading to their grandchildren while he complained about the lack of sweets in the house, which she would have removed because he needed to watch his cholesterol. He was right. Neither of their scenarios would ever become a reality. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to say yes.

“Pete, I can’t. I don’t want to marry anyone just because I’m dying, especially you. You’re my partner, my best friend. I love you too much to let you walk down the aisle with someone who will be dead before the end of the year.”

“It doesn’t have to be for real,” he said. Pete took her hand and slipped the paper ring on her skeletal finger. “I now pronounce us husband and wife, Mrs. and Mr. Lattimer.”

Myka looked at the aged paper against her pale skin, studied it, felt the full weight of realization settle in the pit of her stomach. It would be the only wedding ring she would ever wear. She looked into his eyes for a long moment before she finally said, “Just so you know, if I ever did _get_ married, I would absolutely keep my own name.”

“OK then, Mr. Pete Lattimer and Mrs. Myka Bering,” Pete amended. “Better?”

“Much.”

He settled back against the headboard and let Myka lean on him once again. “So let’s say we had gotten together and we hadn’t, you know, killed each other…what do you think things would’ve been like?” Pete mused.

“Oh it’s a guarantee that we’d kill each other,” Myka scoffed. Pete chuckled in agreement. “It would have taken us forever to get together in the first place,” she continued, “and we would either have been together for years before we ever got married or some horrible incident at the Warehouse would have encouraged us to take a chance and get married ridiculously soon.”

"That sounds about right,” he commented. “Kids?”

“Two boys and a girl,” she replied. “Beatrice and Horatio.”

Pete shuddered at Horatio. “And the other boy?”

Myka looked up at him and stated, “I thought we’d name him after your dad.”

Pete found that he couldn’t form any words to respond and instead gave her shoulder a squeeze.

They stayed awake for several more hours, dreaming about what their lives could have been, before drifting off to sleep, still leaning over each other. Sometime after Myka’s bedroom filled with sunlight, they awoke to the smell of coffee and cooking breakfast wafting from the kitchen. After promising to bring Myka a cup of tea, Pete went to the guest room and changed into a new pair of jeans and a fresh blue cotton t-shirt then wandered downstairs. There he found Myka’s mother at the stove and her father sitting at the table, folded newspaper in hand. They both looked gray and haggard, as if they had aged a decade in a matter of days.

“How is she?” Mr. Bering asked.

“Tired,” Pete said, helping himself to the full pot of coffee. “And she seems, I don’t know, weaker, a lot more than she’s been the last couple of days.”

“So it could probably be any time now?” Myka’s mother wanted to know.

Pete stared at his reflection on the surface of his black coffee and he nodded. “Yeah, probably,” he said tersely. He took a few minutes to shovel down some food and then left the kitchen with his coffee and Myka’s tea. She thanked him, took one sip, and then set it aside before sinking wearily back into her pillows. Her muscles went lax and her breathing seemed more labored than it had the day before, the simple act of drawing oxygen into her lungs was almost more effort than she could muster. Pete stepped out into the hallway and pulled his cell phone from his pocket.

An irascible voice answered after the fourth ring and Pete said, “Artie, you guys should get back here soon. I don’t know how much longer it’s going to be.”

While Myka slept, Pete sank into the chair at her bedside. He watched the rise and fall of her chest, listened to each raspy breath as she struggled to pull in air. They had talked so much in the small hours of the morning that the new silence was killing him. He drank his coffee and wished it had something extra in it, something to dull the pain throbbing against his ribcage. Being a recovered alcoholic didn’t mean that there weren’t times when Pete wanted to crawl back inside a bottle. He currently wanted to be somewhere that smelled of peanuts and stale beer, where the air was dark and sluggish under the burden of languid blues chords, where a voice that crackled like cigarette ashes would give words to his pain, where a heavy glass filled with amber liquid and melting ice would conform perfectly to the curve of his fingers.

Instead, Pete drank his coffee and listened to Myka breathe.

It wasn’t long before the others arrived. Pete said nothing as they shuffled quietly into the room. Dressed all punky and in purple, Claudia made herself comfortable on the mattress, stretched out alongside Myka. Steve, unshaven and dressed similarly to Pete, lowered himself to the corner of the bed next to Claudia’s feet while Artie, clad, as always, in his standard uniform of a dress shirt and sweater vest, stood just to Steve’s right. The movement of the bed roused Myka and her eyes came into focus on her Warehouse family.

Her lips drooped into an awkward grin and she said, “I feel…a bit like…Dorothy.” From under her heavy eyelids she looked first at Artie and then from Claudia to Steve, “I’ve got…the professor and the…Tin Man and the lion.” Myka’s hand slid off the bed, half outstretched towards Pete, and she lolled her head toward him. “And I’ve got my scarecrow.”

Pete looked down at the floor. He set down his coffee mug and, unbidden, the dialogue skittered into his mind. He could see the film scene perfectly in his head. Dorothy, leaving Oz, telling the scarecrow, _“I think I’ll miss you most of all.”_

To ease the pall in the room, he forced a laugh and said, “Yep, that’s me. The one without a brain.”

The laughter that followed wasn’t genuine, it rarely was after one of Pete’s jokes, but it was enough to make them all feel normal again, even if it was only for a moment. After a few hours of telling stories from Myka’s days at the Warehouse, Mrs. Bering appeared with Myka’s medication and everyone left the room to let Myka get some rest.

They sat downstairs in the kitchen with the Berings, sipping on cooling mugs of tea or coffee and making halfhearted small talk. No one knew what to say, how to act. Each person seated at the table was familiar with the workings of death. They had all lost a relative or a colleague or an acquaintance, but those deaths had been sudden, unexpected; none of them had ever seen a loved one atrophy and wither as Myka had done with increasing speed over the last few months.

When the forced conversations became too much for Pete to bear, he politely excused himself and hurried out of the kitchen. He wanted to run out the door, to keep running down the street past the appliance store and the post office, past the bakery and the craft shop and the diner until he was out of town. He wanted to keep running until he hit the state line and then go further. He wanted to Forrest Gump his way across the country, across the world if he had to, until he found a way to save Myka. He wanted to run until his legs buckled and could no longer support his weight. He wanted to run until his lungs fell in on themselves and refused to re-inflate. He wanted to know how it felt to have his body betray him as Myka’s had done to her. He wanted to run until he felt freedom from the sorrow that had seeped into the marrow of his bones.

But Pete didn’t run away. Claudia found him on the upstairs landing, seated cross-legged on the floor outside Myka’s open bedroom door.

“Had a feeling I’d find you here,” Claudia said as she lowered herself onto the carpet and settled down across from him.

“Am I that predictable?” Pete wondered. “Or is it your new Warehouse caretaker spidey-sense that lets you lo-jack me?”

"Both,” Claudia replied. “Or neither. I just know you.”

For the first time since he’d arrived in Colorado, Pete lowered his defenses. His voice wavered when he asked, “What am I supposed to do Claud? I need someone to tell me because I have no idea.”

“You’re already doing it, Pete. You’re here. That’s all you can do.”

“No,” Pete shook his head violently. “No, that can’t be all. After everything we’ve been through, this isn’t how it’s supposed to end.”

“And how would you have it end?” Claudia inquired, her eyes darkened by her heartache.

“I wouldn’t,” Pete blurted out. “This shouldn’t be happening to Myka. She could do so much more, get all of the really great things she deserves. It just isn’t fair.”

Claudia reached out and laid her hand on his knee. “Everyone has that potential, Pete. That’s why death is so tragic, because all that potential and all of those things that could have been… they just vanish. It leaves us with no answers to a million what-ifs. Myka, your dad, Steve’s sister…they all could have done so much more, but instead of melting my brain thinking about all the could-have-beens I’ve elected to focus on all the great things they did. ”

Pete watched two great tears cut tracks down Claudia’s cheeks. “That’s rather zen of you,” he gave a little smirk.

“Blame Jinksy,” Claudia wiped away the moisture on her face.

From Myka’s room, they heard a barely audible call of “Hey, Claud?”

Wordlessly, Claudia rose. She touched his shoulder and then stepped across the threshold, leaving a voiceless sympathy in her place.

In time, the others were summoned and Pete stayed at his post, watching the parade. While he was talking with a sniffling Artie, Mrs. Bering, holding her sobbing daughter Tracy, told him, “Pete, Myka wants to see you now.”

He nodded, stiffened his shoulders, and inhaled deeply before following the trail the others had blazed from the threshold to Myka’s bedside.

“Saving the best for last, eh?” Pete said as he seated himself and leaned over to prop his elbows on the mattress.

“You…know it,” Myka smiled weakly. She had a book open on her chest and her fingers trembled as she tried to hand it to him.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“I wanted to know if…you would read that at my…” Myka trailed off. Pete wondered if it was because of her breathing difficulties or she couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence. As his eyes scanned the page, she spoke again. “Yesterday, at the lake...I couldn’t get this…out of my head.”

“’…meadow flowers and butterflies in summers that have been. Of yellow leaves and gossamer in autumns that there were, with morning mist and silver sun and wind upon my hair,’” Pete murmured the words. “I don’t know, Mykes. Gossamer and butterflies? It’s a bit girly. It could hurt my image.”

She attempted another smile. “If you use my funeral…to pick up vulnerable women…I will haunt your ass.”

Pete closed the book. He was counting on her haunting him. He expected to see her on crowded sidewalks, in airport terminals, in the produce section of the grocery store, in the vast and dusty reaches of the Warehouse. Anywhere he went, he would see her too, always out of the corner of his eye and never for longer than a heartbeat.

"I’d never pick up women at my wife’s funeral,” he assured her.

"Thanks.” Myka closed her eyes for a long moment and Pete wondered if she had fallen asleep.

“I should let you rest,” he said and started to rise.

“What exactly…am I resting for, Pete?” she queried. “It’s not…like I’m going to get any better.”

“I…I don’t know,” he stammered.

“I’m tired,” Myka told him. “So tired. Everything’s…thick and golden and heavy,” she paused to breathe. “Like I’m swimming in honey.”

Pete understood that thickness. It lodged in his windpipe, made speaking a Herculean effort. “Hey now, this is a serious moment,” he chided, tears stinging his eyes and blurring his vision, “I don’t need to be thinking of you covered in honey.”

A laugh bubbled out of Myka’s throat and promptly gave way to tears. “I thought I was…all cried out,” she told him. “I didn’t want to cry in front of you. I wanted…to be strong.”

“You don’t have to be strong for me, Mykes,” Pete snuffled. “Look at me; I’m not being strong.”

"Yes, you are…You’re always strong. You’re…a superhero. I was partners with…a real hero.”

“A real hero could’ve saved you.” The words came out more bitterly than he’d intended.

“Pete…you did save me. So many times…so many ways. But this time, you couldn’t. No one could.”

Pete cupped her hand between his palms and on an impulse he kissed it.

“So…chivalrous. Like a prince in a…fairy tale,” she commented.

A thought raced through Pete’s mind. He lowered Myka’s hand and then reached for the wine and gold covered copy of _The Princess_ sitting atop the stack of books on the bedside table. He thumbed through the pages until he neared the conclusion of the poem and then, finding the right place to begin, he read aloud.

“’My bride, my wife, my life. O we will walk this world, yoked in all exercise of noble end, and so through those dark gates across the wild that no man knows. Indeed I love thee: come, yield thyself up:  my hopes and thine are one.’” He took her hand again. “’Lay thy sweet hands in mine and trust to me.’”

Pete closed the book. “Now, I have no idea what I just said, but somehow it seemed appropriate.”

Myka managed another short laugh through her tears. She scrunched her eyes up tight and squeezed his hand with the little strength that remained in her. “It’s not fair,” she cried. “It’s not fair that I…have to leave now that…you’re willingly…reading poetry.”

Pete’s vision blurred. “Then don’t go. Stay here, Mykes. We all love you here – your, your parents and Tracy, Jinks and and and Claudia. Hell, even Artie. And me, Mykes; I love you, too. Please,” he choked the word out on a sob. “Please stay.”

Her wet eyes glittered and she told him, “I love you too, Pete.”

He felt the grip of her fingers lessen, saw her dark eyes go dim. “No no no no no no no no,” the word cascaded from his tongue, fell from his lips over and over like lemmings. “Myka, please stay. Please, _please_ don’t leave.”

Myka’s eyelids fluttered closed. She murmured words he couldn’t hear and then never made another sound.

She was gone.

“No no no no no no,” Pete mumbled, his whispers slowly turning into a strangled scream.

Clutching Myka’s hand, Pete buried his face in the bedclothes and wept freely, like a brokenhearted child. No other noise sounded, save for the autumn wind rattling a tree branch against the window, keeping time to Pete’s sobs. The rest was silence.

 

* * *

 

“These are lovely,” the middle-aged woman commented, neatly arranging the fresh white petals of the daisies among the hues of lush purple. “What’s the occasion?”

Pete’s eyes were downcast as he extracted his wallet and thumbed through the bills. “It’s, uh, it’s for an anniversary,” he quietly answered.

“For your wife?” the florist’s lips turned upward in a smile.

Pete shook his head. “I’m not married.” He laid the money on the counter and accepted the flowers.

“I’m a widower.”

He just saw the florist’s smile vanish before he turned and left the shop and climbed back into the SUV.

The drive was a short one and he knew it from memory. Pete drove through the small Colorado town until he reached the cemetery just on the outskirts. There he wandered the headstones until he found the grave he sought.

_MYKA OPHELIA BERING_

_Life shall live for evermore_

Pete laid the bouquet on the neatly manicured grass. Then, he pulled out his wallet and retrieved from the folds a creased strip of paper. He smoothed it between his fingertips and refashioned it into the paper band he’d made a year ago. Without an explanation, Myka had disassembled it and given it to Claudia with instructions to return it to him later. Claudia had found him at the gathering after the funeral and handed him the strip of paper.

“She said you’d know what it was,” Claudia had told him.

Pete had smiled and thanked her, offering no clarification to Myka’s directive. He had put it into his wallet for safe keeping then joined the line at the food table and tucked into the first meal he’d had in three days.

Now he adjusted the band and slid it onto his finger.

Pete gazed at the memorial. He had had a thousand conversations with her in his head over the past three hundred and sixty five days, occasionally muttering to the insubstantial air around him, but now found it difficult to say anything it all.

“Hi…Myka,” he drawled, no other words coming to his mind. Pete sighed then straightened his shoulders, felt himself center. “My…My… my bride, my wife, my life.” Pete turned the fragile paper in a slow circle then laid his fingertips on the cold, damp granite headstone.

He smiled. “Hey, Mykes.”


End file.
